The Mana World Forums

I am interested in creating some music (hopefully to be used in TMW). Does any one know of a good program to create the music with? I do not have a keyboard readily available, so creating midi with a keyboad is kinda ruled out, but if there is some other way of creating music, I am willing to give it a shot.

i did my music creation experiments with fl studio. I even bought a serial to upgrade the free demo version (which has no restriction and can even export, but can't save projects) to the "Fruityloops Edition" for $100.

A professional soundtrack composer i talked to worked with Steinberg Cubase.

List of open source audio editing software on Wikipedia ...and another one

Try Propellerheads' Reason!

The sequencer in it, isn't brilliant, but for about £200, you've got one of the most versatile programs around. There's so much you can do and so many possiblities when it comes to re-wiring modules (press tab and it flips your rack round so you can re-cable any way you want

I'm still on version 2.5 and it's serving me really well alongside Sonar, but I use it a lot on it's own too...

Frankly, I think music composition software is way over priced. It isn't the 20th century anymore, with the vast number of programmers (large supply), and with unchanged demand, the market price should be relatively low. But that only happens with free market, software monopoly certainly eliminated any competitions.

There are many great audio open source projects that are copyleft, so that software can be improved without restrictions. Cubase is nice, but I haven't seen anything it can do, that free alternative can't.

The basic rule of economy, price = demand / supply, does not apply to software markets because the production price per produced unit is negligible compared to the development cost. This leads to the bizzare situation that more supply and less demand does in fact increase the price because the same development cost has to be paid with fewer sold units.

When there are more software vendors who are sharing the same user base they all have fewer customers and thus are forced to either increase their prices or lower the quality of future versions of their product to have the same profit margin - both very unpopular moves and thus usually avoided when possible.

Sometimes you see software companies lowering their prices in situations of a competive market. They usually lose a lot of money doing this and usually only do so to get competition with less capital in the back off of the market so they have it for themself. This happened between Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape in the early days of the world wide web, for example. When this happens all vendors in the market segment lose significant income and even when someone manages to monopolize the market with this method the customers won't accept it when the prices are increased again. Thus most software companies avoid a price war when it is possible - it hurts themself more than it helps.

I learn something new every day!

Although, considering the interface and options a sequencer is about more than end capability, ease of use and the interface and many other factors contribute towards it... and the fact remains, that as an investment, the quality of music/audio you can get easily from high end sequencers makes them a finer proposition...